The mourners were not plentiful on the day of the funeral. Charvik Sharma had not been a popular man in this life, having dedicated very little time to cultivating and maintaining relationships. Sahil, his eldest, watched the people move about in respectful silence, occasionally stopping with one of his siblings or mother to offer quiet […]

‘Why do we have to sit on the hill?’ Zach said. ‘Why can’t we go in like everyone else?’ He’d asked this question every year for three years running, and he always got the same response. ‘Because we can’t afford it,’ his father said. Zach had heard these five words more times than he’d heard […]

Over the airport the sky yawns wide, grey-brown with rainclouds gently weeping. As we land from Mumbai, this wide prospect dismays me. Has Calcutta grown up too? But it’s the same old diesel-stinking, sunshine-yellow Ambassador taxi that carries Ma and Mohan and me cross-town. The same old double-decker buses – saggy-tired, wheezy-breathed, precariously lopsided – […]

I have this recurring dream, maybe twice a week. Or, maybe because it has recurred for so many months, it’s only once a week but it seems like twice a week. Whatever. The dream arrives like the slow-motion appearance of a wild-eyed merry-go-round horse emerging from the swirling fog of sleep, and it seems to […]

I arrive just after 6pm, wheeling my suitcase up the long gravel drive from where the taxi dropped me off. The drive curves, so the house only comes into view gradually – a Georgian mansion with tall, many-paned windows and squat chimneys. Steps lead up to a portico with Doric columns that looks like it […]

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is an outsider artist, a poet and a teacher. He is the poetry editor at the Indian Poetry Review and an Art instructor at the Kishlaya Outsider Art Academy. Sandeep is the bestselling author of poetry collection One Heart- Many Breaks, published in 2020. He has received the  Indian Achievers Award in […]

Ed Dallimore is the author of The Vineyards of Britain, to be published by Fairlight Books in June 2022. Ed has worked in the wine industry for over twelve years. He has spent the majority of his career championing small-scale and independent winemakers. He lived in Sydney for eight years, representing boutique wineries across the region. […]

Thomas Morgan is a writer from Worthing in West Sussex. He’s had stories published in Dream Catcher Magazine, Truffle Magazine, STORGY, Bandit Fiction, Untitled: Voices, Idle Ink, Sledgehammer Literary Journal, and Free Flash Fiction. Thomas started writing short stories in 2019, having spent nearly three years trying to write TV pilots. His short story ‘Promises’ […]

Amita Basu is a cognitive scientist by day. Her fiction has appeared/is forthcoming in Fairlight Books, CommuterLit, Bandit Fiction, Toyon, Bewildering Stories, Gasher, and other magazines and anthologies. She lives in Bangalore. Amita has been writing all her life: she started with longhand in notebooks and on loose-leaf, before moving to a desktop computer in […]

IJ Fenn writes stories for fun and has been published three times since 2006 (a true crime, two volumes of miscellany – stories, poetry and essays). Fenn is currently finalising a miserable novel befitting our current COVID times, has a volume of short stories under consideration with a publisher in the UK, and is mapping […]